Monday, July 31, 2006

This has been on the front page of the Rocky all day: "Peace program aims to erase chill distrust." It's about Jewish, Palestinian and Christian teenage girls? Who got together in Denver to learn about each other's cultures? And ended up loving each other? (Not that way, you pervs!)

For the first time in their 16-year-old lives, the Jewish girl in the WHY BE NORMAL? T-shirt and jeans and the Muslim girl in the hijab covering her head and full-length dress covering the rest of her are able to sit in the same room and talk and smile and share.

Yes, 7,000 miles away the maelstrom of war, fear, mistrust and percolating hatred that has swirled through and defined so much of their lives whorls on, taking more lives, poisoning more souls. But here, right now, in Denver, there is something else going on.

There is a beginning.

"She is wonderful," says Islam of Ofer.

"She's very cool," says Ofer of Islam.

Ofer, meet Islam. Islam, meet Ofer.

The story's sickly-sweet tone reminds me of Tom Wolfe's description of the press (in The Right Stuff) as "the consummate hypocritical Victorian gent"--ever-ready to teach the boobs the appropriate attitude toward absolutely everything--including the "peace programs" of soppy teenage girls.

Drunkablog hero the genetically modified tamarisk leaf beetle may be winning the battle against Western river-destroying tamarisk trees.

A year after beetles developed by scientists were released in selected tamarisk infestations at three sites in Colorado, the project is showing encouraging signs that the bugs will significantly defoliate the water-sucking trees that clog most Western rivers.

"It's still wait and see, but so far it's very encouraging," Dan Bean, manager of the Palisade Insectary, which helped develop the tamarisk leaf beetle, said Thursday. "If everything goes well, we'll see significant effects in two years."

I wrote about the tamarisk leaf beetle release in this slightly hopeful post last year. Now it sounds like they're doing better than expected. This would be a huge environmental win, more significant in this idiot's opinion than any alleged solution to (alleged) anthropogenic global warming.

It hasn't been covered like that, of course; in fact, it's hardly been covered at all. Besides the Colorado Department of Agriculture press release from which the Rocky got the story, the only mention I can find is from TV station KKCO in Grand Junction. Hey, environmental reporters! Over here!

(h/t: John W. Doyle)

Update: No doubt the little critters'll get into the uranium tailings outside Moab and mutate into pus-dripping monsters that work humans cruelly in their tamarisk mines until laying eggs in worn-out miners whose bodies are eaten to husks by voracious hatchlings. We don't want to negotiate. We want you to die.

Saturday, July 29, 2006

Dean Saitta of "Teachers for a Democratic Society" (blech) (TDS) defends the organization's petition for the "unfiring" of Ward Churchill in the thread to this PB post. Good stuff. Not his stuff, his interlocuters' . Yours truly weighs in with absolutely unanswerable arguments (Update: okay, okay, unanswerable invective.)

Spoiler alert! Dean Saitta is a 60s-obsessed moonbat. But you already knew that.

Update: What the hell is that thing wearing a mortarboard at the top of TDS's main page? A festering cantaloupe? Where do I sign, Dean Saitta?

Investigators have communicated with [Browne] since [2002] in letters and personal interviews. In that time, Browne has provided details on numerous other murders [48, to be exact] throughout the U.S., including nine in Colorado, the sheriff's office said.

Browne has been in prison since 1995 for the killing of a 13-year-old Black Forest, Colorado, girl, and apparently spontaneously decided to confess all his murders. Of course, like Ottis Toole (note weird first-name spelling--shades of "Alferd" Packer), Browne might be confessing to anything and everything just for the attention.

Tuesday, July 25, 2006

My senile little Ford Escort wagon averaged 42 miles a gallon over the 2000 or so miles from Denver to Illinois and back. When every car in the U.S. is that efficient we won't need to go to war for oooooiiiiiillllll anymore--we can do it just for fun like we used to.

In Nebraska a semi-truck with one of those two-foot-tall light-bulb crosses (Christian, I assume) on the grille got behind me. Seen those? I think they're a new(ish) trucker fashion. I've even seen a neon one. It was dark, but I wanted a picture of this one so I slowed down and aimed the camera backwards blindly. Didn't work at all, but apparently I slowed down too much and/or the trucker saw my flash, because suddenly he was RIGHT BEHIND ME and even when I sped up he wouldn't get off my tail. Didn't turn into Duel or anything, but he scared the crap outta me. Check it out:

Sunday, July 23, 2006

Saturday, July 22, 2006

Ever sneezed with a mouthful of toothpaste? The tree mold count in Denver must be high, because I'm dying, and not from the minty freshness dribbling out of my nose.

Billy Bob and I made it home safe, to a joyous reception from the D-a-W. I'm plumb wore out though, and we have visitors coming to stay for a few days, so posting will continue to be spotty, as if anyone could tell.

Thursday, July 20, 2006

A plaque adorning a wall of the rest stop in Iowa I visited last week. The rest stop is dedicated to Henry Wallace, 1948 presidential candidate (that was a wild one), Roosevelt's last veep, and Adair County, Iowa, native son:

We took Amtrak from Springfield up to Chicago the other day. Very pleasant ride, but Chicago was miserably hot, and on the street we scuttled frantically from shade to airconditioning like ants under a magnifying glass. It makes me tired thinking about it, so I'll just post some unoriginal (but you knew that) pictures.

View from the Sears Tower. Whatever. Last time the D-a-W and I were here in the spring of 2002, the observation deck was closed. I forget why.

It was a busy news day.

Shapes.

More shapes.

That's a fountain. It's like twenty stories tall and water cascades down its sides. You can get your picture taken and have it flashed on the thing for a second. Very weird. Big Brother is watching, and it's Urkel.

Wednesday, July 19, 2006

Boy, the blogeratin' ain't goin too well at all. Every day I'm busy, and even if I weren't, it's too freakin' hot. To blog. That's really hot. And the Drunkablog has a life besides blogging, you know. Some pictures instead:

This is the licence on a vehicle owned by the peasant who farms the Drunkablog acres (and many others'). (Update: Jeff Gordon? Git them brats a yourn and git off'n my propity!)

The peasant's house. Knowing what he does about farming, the Drunkablog felt competent to demand: Peasant! Why isn't this plow in use, you lazy . . . (sounds of whipping) Peasant: Please, sir! I won't do it no more! Ha ha! (I reply) Then you won't mind removing your underwear! Peasant: Please, sir, not my unde--

Sorry. Here's a picture of a foodstuff:

Yes, it's corn. Glorious corn. Bow down before it. Bow down if you want to live! The corn grows angry!

Pretty good crop this year, he said like he knows what he's talking about, if the Japanese beetles leave anything:

They eat and hump at the same time. Nature knows how things are supposed to be.

Peasants treated kindly

The Drunkablog's forebears were always improving the land for their sharecroppers. Today, the tradtion continues! Check out this recent improvement:

What? It holds stuff.

This last pic has nothing to do with anything.

The Drunkablog's great-uncle Manley Mathers'

tombstone in Mason City, Illinois.

Manley was a Great White Hunter, and had a menagerie on his farm just outside town that had elephants and monkeys and a zebra or two, among other animals. In the late 40s or early 50s it caught fire, and all the animals died. By today's standards I'm sure Manley didn't treat the poor creatures very well. For many years the lion cage sat empty next to Route 29.

Manley died in 1949. An inscription at the very bottom of the upright millstone reads, "Our Doc"--with the quotation marks, so probably no one ever called him that.

Believe it or not, the menagerie fire was caught on film. I've made a couple of feeble attempts to get hold of it, but no luck yet.

Thursday, July 13, 2006

Practically every commercial structure along the way has wireless internet now, including rest stops. Here's the stool I used to blog most of this post. It was provided by a generous state at the Henry Wallace rest stop in Adair County, Iowa:

Tuesday, July 11, 2006

I took a bunch of pictures of eastern Colorado and western Nebraska today but brought the wrong damn USB cord, you lucky bastids. Till I get the right one tomorrow here's a pic that was already on the computer:

The Drunkablog heads east tomorrow. Destination: Tokyo--uh, central Illinois, home of Ward Churchill. He'll have a laptop (borrowed from the D-a-W) and will attempt to post along the road. On the way back he may even wander a little (and not just his mind!), check out some places, meet the people in the villages.

It's almost exactly a thousand miles from Denver to Lincoln, Illinois, and the Drunkablog is a little scared because he will be driving his 1993 Ford Escort. Yes, this is actually one of the six semi-operational Escorts left from that model year:

You can't tell from this picture, but the Vistacruiser was 86 feet long (2006 Drunkablog estimate). In 1969 a single poorly maintained Vistacruiser consumed more oil than the entire People's Republic of North Korea (1970 U.S. Department of Oil estimate).

I've always wanted one.

The Escort will do fine

But the Escort will do fine, I keep telling myself. And there's one major technical improvement I've made (not to the car, of course) that'll make things go much better. When Billy Bob and I drove to northern California not quite two years ago (3000+ miles round trip) this was our sound system:

The car's radio and tape player (and air conditioner) gave up the ghost years ago, and, unbelievably, the 1993 Escort didn't come with a CD player. Hence the triple-threat boombox and allied crap.

But this year Billy Bob will actually be able to sit in the front passenger seat (when he's not driving), because this year we broke down and bought the not-new-to-anyone-except-us miracle music-playing device, the Opid:

The Opid: It's in the center of the Frisbee, in case you didn't spot it right away.

This is the four-gigabyte (well, 3.88) model. Besides all the music, I've put on scores of old radio shows, than which there is nothing better to listen to while driving.

Hackneyed

This is hackneyed (it's the Drunkablog, after all), but it kills me that on this tiny ultramodern hunk of metal I can listen to (just as a few examples) a live 1927 broadcast of Charles Lindbergh's triumphal procession up the Potomac to Washington, D.C., after his return from Paris; Pete Seeger singing a surprisingly bloodthirsty little ditty called 'Round and 'Round Hitler's Grave during one of the first coast-to-coast radio hookups in February, 1942; and, at the far end of the same war, Lord Haw-Haw's drunken last broadcast from Berlin as it fell to the Russians ("HeiHiller," he slurs).

Plus Jack Benny. And "Dragnet." And "Information Please." Living history, done live (well, not "Dragnet"), and for that perhaps more entertaining now than when first broadcast.

Cut the maundering, freak

There'll be a post from somewhere tomorrow, probably. Maybe after I get across the line into Kansas and "the fuzz" can't hassle me no more.

Update: Since I mentioned the trip here's Billy Bob chasing his Frisbee in northern California surf. He got absolutely crushed a couple times, which seemed to learn him:

He'd always forgotten by the next day though, so I, at least, had lots of fun playing Frisbee with the idiot.

Update: The picture of the front-passenger space full of stuff is a re-creation. I never thought to take a picture of the actual mess, but it was much worse what with the spilled coffee and dissolving dog biscuits, etc.

Sunday, July 09, 2006

Australia's intrepiddebunker of politically correct "black armband" history (and historians), Keith Windschuttle, was named last month to the board of the taxpayer-funded and almost-as-biased-as-the-BBC Australian Broadcasting Company. The appointment provoked comical cries of anguish from the usual sort, to which Windschuttle gleefully links. Always entertaining to read what the Australian left is saying about their own personal Satan. They get so hysterical, and only because he calls them liars and makes it stick.

Saturday, July 08, 2006

A week ago LGF linked to a story about an Egyptian couple who pled guilty to slavery charges in California. Coincidentally, Colorado's own slavery case was resolved just the day before, when a Saudi man was convicted of "kidnapping, extorting, and sexually abusing a 24-year-old woman who came from Saudi Arabia six years ago as a cook and nanny." His wife had already copped to lesser charges. Bizzare quote from the prosecutor about the sexual abuse:

"He's thinking if he's going to get caught (for hiring an illegal immigrant), he might as well get his bang for the buck, Tomsic said."

She's a freakin' idiot, but she won the case.

Over nine hundred pages of documents related to the Columbine massacre released last week. Amazingly or maybe not so, there's almost nothing new in all that mass about the evil (a word assiduously avoided in this RMN story) little f*cks. (Update: Just saw this story that Harris actually downloaded a bunch of crude hints of the pair's plan to his school computer files the day before the attack, but nobody noticed until afterwards.)

Both parties are making absolute asses of themselves trying to appear tougher-than-thou in the Colorado special legislative session on illegal immigration. Here's the Post and the News today. Can't get very interested, even though I dearly love the term "anchor baby," especially when it's used in a headline like "Fur flies over anchor babies" Poetry! (Update: the News link has expired and the story is in limbo. This happens all the time, and it's irritating as hell. No telling whether it'll ever show up again, at least in the same form.)

Aerial photographs show the campers carved 40-50 miles of trails in the woods [must've had a meth lab out there--ed.] and a nearby meadow, Forest Service spokeswoman Denise Ottaviano said.

Rainbows profess peace, love and respect for the earth, but any gathering that size will have consequences, Ottaviano said.

"There was just a shocking amount of trails through that area," she said. "Just simply by being there they had an impact on the land." Rainbows dug fire pits and latrines, and foot traffic between camps spread over four square miles trampled grass and left paths.

Of course, the last two paragraphs take it all back:

Several hundred Rainbows are expected to stay behind after today's official end to the gathering. Members say they will remain on the land into August, helping to clean up, reseed, remove footbridges and return the land to its natural state.

Forest Service specialists, including experts in soil and water plan to supervise the restoration.

Here's one I missed back in May. Circulation for both Denver papers declined much more than the already horrible national average of 2.6 percent over the previous six months--down 4.7 percent for the Post and 4.3 for the Rocky. Scay-ree.

Check out this blog currently appearing on the lame YourHub.com "community" website started by the Rocky and sponsored by both papers, or something. "Timothy's blog" is about

recent events I witness in my neighborhood (Downtown Aurora), my 11 year struggle with chronic pain (including 7 spinal surgeries and more to come), updates on my hunt for/and disruption of Internet child predators in Colorado, and much more.

If that doesn't get you interested, Timothy's bio-line reads, "Timothy J. Miller is a Mortgage Professional, Marketing Guru, and 45-day coma survivor."

Wait, did I say "scientist?" I meant "crazy person." If it had appeared anywhere but Democratic Underground I'd have been sure this was a joke, but it didn't, so I'm almost sure it isn't. Serious or not, this post is the funniest thing I've seen in a hell of a long time.

Thursday, July 06, 2006

In the response, according to the Denver Post, Churchill's attorney David Lane said,

"Professor Churchill's grounds for this appeal include the fact that the committee's report and the recommendation of the interim chancellor were against the weight of the credible evidence presented and was in retaliation for his First Amendment protected free speech."

A spokesperson for CU President Hank Brown told the Post that Churchill's appeal is "just a procedural aspect at this point since the report from privilege and tenure committee will be coming back to (Brown) for a decision . . . . It's not prudent to issue a comment at this point except to say that the process is in motion."

Neither the Post nor the News provided the full text of the appeal (the News' piece). No mention either of Churchill's (alleged) response last month in which he accused the committee assigned to investigate his scholarship of some of the same offenses he was found to have committed.

That "suggestion" in the title is the word the Post uses in its headline, by the way. Strong.

Tuesday, July 04, 2006

We "camped" this weekend in the "wilds" of Dillon "Reservoir" (oops, one too many scare quotes there), which is considerably more refined and prosperous than our own neighborhood:

Oh, we have a boat, do we? Well, bully for us. (The D-blogs, needless to say, do not have a boat. Leaky canoe, yes; boat, no.)

The Hegemonator: The D-blog's father-in-law Wendell--Army Air, career Air Force, dedicated minion of the military-industrial-recreational-vehicle complex. Wendell has a cat named Chipper whom every evening he hand-feeds shrimp while he himself enjoys a single (eight-ounce) martini. The complacent fascist (Wendell, not Chipper) calls this "happy hour."

Dillon Reservoir "not natural"

Maybe not, but it has the best frisbee golf course in the state!

Hippies tee off. See the daypack bottom center? They had about 12 different frisbees in there--putters, drivers--hell, for all I know mashies and wedgies too. Or are those the same thing? Shut up. Who cares? And who am I quoting with that "not natural" in the subhead? Nobody!

Each fairway runs 325 to 375 yards and has a par of 3 or 4. Here's the 13th "hole" (with scare quotes you need to taper):

The dirt is the "green" (tapering!)

We were going to play, but there were too many people waiting in between rainshowers.

We read in the tent while Billy made crop circles. He does this by yanking his frisbee around with his front paws:

Aerial view. He makes them in snow, too.

I didn't say they were good crop circles. He's a dog, for Chrissakes.

We've never figured out why he does this, but it gets annoying:

Dirt flies everywhere like you've set you're lawn chair up in a construction site. (Despite the axe, however, no animal that didn't deserve it was harmed during this camping trip.)

Oh, and here's Billy Bob's high-school graduation picture:

(I actually took it this weekend. Billy Bob never made it through junior high, let alone high school. He's real touchy about it too. I'd need a face transplant if he knew I told anyone. Noble hound my ass.)

Unproductive fun was had by most.

Update: The D-a-W says her "little Eichmann" of a daddy's daily martini contains more like 12 ounces of wodka. Probably this kind. Guess that's why he's such a happy hegemon.

Update II: Only by blogging would the Drunkablog ever have learned that there exists such a thing as kosher vodka.

Update III: Yes, a "crop circle" by definition should contain a "circle" in a "crop" (tapering!). That a Billy Bob "crop circle" contains neither, however, is really none of your business.

Sunday, July 02, 2006

STEAMBOAT SPRINGS, Colo. (AP) -- A founding member of a hippie movement called the Rainbow Family suggested Saturday that it launch a federal lawsuit against a growing crackdown on their annual gatherings.

Barry Adams, known in the Rainbow Family as Barry Plunker, told a council circle at the first day of this year's weeklong gathering at Routt National Forest that federal pressure has gone too far.

Dozens of Forest Service officers, county deputies and Colorado State Patrol officers are manning checkpoints and patrolling camps as thousands of hippies flood the forest about 30 miles north of Steamboat Springs.

Under federal rules, any gathering of more than 74 people in a national forest requires a permit. Officials have said that in a fire, the narrow dirt access road would become clogged and campers would be trapped.

The clash between Rainbows and federal officers at national parks has become such an annual tradition that the Forest Service in 1998 established a national response team to deal with the group. Members defying federal orders typically are issued citations for camping illegally. . . .

The Forest Service estimated that by Friday night about 6,000 tie-dyed hippies were camping in makeshift villages. That number swelled dramatically Saturday, the first official day of the gathering. . . .

Rainbows formed drum circles, exchanged beads, batik and crystals, and lined up at communal kitchens for meals. Everything is free, from meals to yoga classes to massage. Hugs are doled out at every turn and members greet each other by saying, "Welcome home."

Adams, 61, was drifting with a group of fellow hippies in the 1960s after his service during the Vietnam War when he decided to fulfill a vision of holding a giant gathering based on peace and love. Since the first Rainbow Family gathering in Colorado in 1972, he said, the federal government has denied permits and has done what it could to block the annual gathering. . . .